Revisionist History brings Malcolm Gladwell’s brand of quirky and insightful essay to podcasting. The show is similar to his occasional pieces in thRevisionist History brings Malcolm Gladwell’s brand of quirky and insightful essay to podcasting. The show is similar to his occasional pieces in the New Yorker, such as the classic examination of condiments in The Ketchup Conundrum, except here his overarching theme is a look back at something (an event, an idea, or a person) which “deserves a second chance”.

He’s a big name, so he gets the royal treatment of exceptional production values. Even the theme music is incredible.

But he is a master storyteller, and that’s what really matters.

All ten of the season’s episodes are worth listening to — possibly more than once — but in my estimation, two deserve special mention.

Okay, I’m a bit biased. I’m a schoolteacher, and I chose teaching as my third career specifically because I finally realized I wanted to do something that felt deeply meaningful. Gladwell’s tale of how easy it is for people to fall through the cracks in our social and educational systems is heartrending.

Gladwell’s moving story centers on the “generous orthodoxy” of Chester Wenger, a former Mennonite minister who was removed from his pulpit by his church for violating their doctrine. Wenger’s letter to his church is cited an exemplar of a wonderfully thoughtful compromise between the desire to maintain ideological purity and the goal of compassionately adapting to specific contexts and, perhaps, changing cultural perspectives.

There are a lot of good podcasts out there, but this one is among the best....more

I stumbled on this in a recommendation from one Goodreads friend to a different one, and saw that it was described as a sexy Gothic paranormal romp.

YeI stumbled on this in a recommendation from one Goodreads friend to a different one, and saw that it was described as a sexy Gothic paranormal romp.

Yeah, it is. As a nice bit of fluff, it was just fine. Anachronisms and paranormal woo galore, and plenty of hyper-irrational behavior justified under the "Gothic romance" escape clause. Some hot sexy scenes, for those who want that, or want to avoid it.

I just wanted a lightweight book to kick off the new year, and this was adequate. I won't be continuing the series — it'd take a much more thoughtful Gothic story to do that....more

Greene looks at the evolutionary origins of intergroup conflict, and attempts to demonstrate that “deep pragmatism” (a form of utilitarianism) can addGreene looks at the evolutionary origins of intergroup conflict, and attempts to demonstrate that “deep pragmatism” (a form of utilitarianism) can address the dilemma that arises due to human’s evolution as a tribal species.

He doesn’t succeed, however. His reasoning contains a few flaws, but ultimately he simply doesn’t address the toughest cases and relies on something akin to an “appeal to urgency”. That isn’t listed as a fallacy in my textbook on critical thinking, but so what?

A wealth of background and history is given, though, which makes the book a fairly useful one. Greene does repeat himself somewhat (probably a subconscious effort to bolster his weak case), and a good editor could probably have shaved off a few dozen pages, at least.

The problem at hand is described as the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality. This is Greene’s intergroup analogue of the well-studied intragroup paradox known as the Tragedy of the Commons. Both are gradually explored through the use of game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

Trolleyology is used a lot in his analysis. This is understandable: Greene cemented his reputation as a cognitive researcher by asking test subjects about that infamous moral dilemma while inside of a fMRI machine. So it is a little ironic that this is also where he stumbles.

First, he conflates two sets of answers. He argues quite persuasively that evolution took some shortcuts in coming up with quick-and-dirty responses to different patterns, and that the divergence in those responses to very similar situations is arbitrary for an understandable reason. To put it very briefly, our different answer to the “footbridge” versus the baseline “switch” situations is because we are “blind to side effects” because evolution didn’t give us the ability to intuitively keep track of multiple chains of causality (see page 225 and following). That’s fine… except he later tells us that when philosophers created a deontological reason for the same thing, that we must dismiss their reasoning as mere rationalization. Uh, no: very poor logic. Even if it is true that the flawed evolutionary-constructed intuition is inconsistent in its conclusions, that doesn’t mean that any other analysis of the same situation must be as well. The remainder of the book relies on his erroneous belief that he could effectively dispense with ethics.

Second, Greene introduces a very hard ethical case early in his discussion of trolleyology: that of a surgeon who is able to heal several other people by stealing organs from one healthy (albeit unwilling) donor (see page 109). He admits to being blindsided by that, so I anticipated him showing how it would be dealt with at some point with his utilitarian approach. But he never did. Instead, he relied on some hand-waving, asserting that utilitarianism, if wisely applied, would prove capable of being deeply pragmatic. Wait — we have to rely on wisdom? But isn’t that precisely what is in short supply? In fact, he points out that just thinking really hard isn’t going to help us — our brains are wired very poorly for that (page 296).

Ultimately, however, this wasn’t the book I expected it to be. The word “tribes” in the title implied something a bit different to me than Greene intended, and I was disappointed about that, too.

As I’ve noted, the “tribe” Greene points to is the evolutionary source of our quite irrational thinking about intergroup conflict resolution. What I hoped the book was going to be about was the highly “tribal” partisan behavior that plagues society today. My favorite academic addressing this is still Dan Kahan, who researches Identity-Protective Cultural Cognition at Yale Law School. But he hasn’t written any books that cover the subject broadly, and his risk-perception orientation isn’t quite what I’m looking for. The basic idea is that the tribal roots of our cognition (what Greene is also pointing to) create a very strong impetus for us to “think” in terms of tribes even today, and that kind of motivated thinking is becoming increasingly prevalent. A good primer on that is the New Yorker article, Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds.

Postscript —

I will say: his endnote and bibliography are great. There are a lot of classic journal articles that I’ve always wanted the citations to, and he definitely delivers.

Post-postscript —

My original pre-review listed a number of reviews and interviews, which I’ll tack on here, just in case someone wants to dig into the archives.

I was a little generous with Sloan's debut novel, giving Mr. Penumbra's a five-star rating, even though it oversold the ending. Sourdough is a humblI was a little generous with Sloan's debut novel, giving Mr. Penumbra's a five-star rating, even though it oversold the ending. Sourdough is a humbler book, but the author again leaves us with an ending that feels almost magically optimistic (or at least aggressively futuristic). He portrays the world in very realistic terms, but then adds in a big dose of woo in. That might work in a book of magical realism, but that isn't the feel of either novel.

I really enjoyed Sourdough due to the delightful characters that inhabit it. Of course, it doesn't hurt that I'm a denizen of San Francisco, and seeing your town in a book is always a bit of a kick, but four stars is again just a little generous. But the skill is there, so I expect to enjoy more of his stuff as time goes by. ...more

There are two brilliant aspects to this book, but the execution was sloppy enough that it couldn't sustain a high rating.

The context (not unique to thThere are two brilliant aspects to this book, but the execution was sloppy enough that it couldn't sustain a high rating.

The context (not unique to this book) is that humans have mastered cloning and associated technologies so well that effective immortality is an everyday idea. Lafferty pulls some of the plausible ramifications out of that which really drive the book in a fascinating direction.

The other highlight is that this is a murder mystery, with the victims forced to try to solve their own murders. That's a conceit that isn't really possible without that cloning technology, obviously.

But the dialog and characterizations aren't up to carrying the story.

Even worse, to me (albeit not to many others, perhaps most) is that Lafferty strains scifi credulity.

I'm happy to grant an author a big chunk of suspended disbelief: that's fundamental to speculative fiction. That immortality idea was what Lafferty asked for. But she kept on nudging more and more "magic" into the stew, which eventually I resent. The final one is what the cooking machine is capable of doing very late in the book with just a sample of saliva. That's as much as I can say without spoilers, but suffice it to say that I had steam coming out of my ears....more

As the blurb notes, the story follows a family of paranormals. Most of the focus is on a period of a few months in the mid-1990s, but with flashbacksAs the blurb notes, the story follows a family of paranormals. Most of the focus is on a period of a few months in the mid-1990s, but with flashbacks to incidents a few decades in the past. This is on the ESP/psychic portion of the paranormal fantasy spectrum — there are no werewolves or vampires — but otherwise the world is true to the United States of those times.

This is a pretty dysfunctional family.

The author doesn’t spend time psychoanalyzing his characters, but I do. One of the difficulties with having these skills is that they can be hard to monetize. Imagine you have the ability to read minds. Now try to figure out a way of using that skill that doesn’t lead towards others mistrusting you. What if you could turn invisible? Or affect material objects with your mind? The rest of us can’t do that, but we can quickly see how you could use your superpower to take advantage of others, and you’ll always be aware of that mistrust.

Most of us indirectly “win” at life because we’ve stumbled into a positive-sum game. When people can trust each other, they cooperate, and they can get more done. Contract law, for example, is a legal institution that allows people and businesses to understand and rely on their agreements with others. Most contracts are never again read after they are written, simply because very few of them ever are invoked in disputes. Most contractual relationships are cooperative, and stay that way.

But the Telemachus family have skills that inspire suspicion, and they’ve incorporated that into their worldview. The outside world is made up of predators and prey.

All that relates to why I suspect the dysfunction in the family is fictionally “true”. I care about that, because being inside the heads and watching the decisions of these folks is often quite frustrating.

The strength of the story is in those lives, though. The story moves pretty slow, but what will pull you along is that you’ll start to care for some, and be quite curious about some of the others.

The payoff at the end is worth it, too. The author gradually unveils more of the story, giving you hints that none of the characters understand, but it is done slowly and artfully, so that as the many story arcs entangle and approach the climax, you’ll have a feel for what is likely to happen and yet still be surprised. One character provokes a pretty provocative question about how their superpower has completely twisted their life — you’ll figure out who it is. And there’s a very nice twist at the end which was very, very clever.

The only difficulty with the book, for me, was pacing: there were times in the first half where I was a little bored. Could this have been cut down by forty or fifty pages?...more

I'm guessing there's a sweet spot, maybe in the tween years, when a kid has the attention span to get throWow, I was barely able to slog through this.

I'm guessing there's a sweet spot, maybe in the tween years, when a kid has the attention span to get through a book like this, but still hasn't developed critical faculties that will soon leave children's fables behind.

As I was reading it, I kept on reflecting on the difference between fable and fantasy. The former is full of bizarre details which only serve as the equivalent of empty calories: no real purpose, other than to vaguely amuse. Fantasy also involves magical storytelling, but the author tries to build a coherent world behind the story.

The idea behind this book is a delight; the actual reading of it was barely tolerable. The only reason I forced myself to finish it was so I could learn what the big deal was. I wonder how many people's affection is actually based on the ninety-minute movie instead of this interminable book?...more

I'm old enough to have read this when it was appropriate to my age, but unfortunately, I just now got around to it. That's a pity, because it is a splI'm old enough to have read this when it was appropriate to my age, but unfortunately, I just now got around to it. That's a pity, because it is a splendid little book. My family also lived in the suburbs of New York about when this was written, although I can't recall any field trip to the Met.

The children, especially, have distinctive and interesting characters, but are far from being the "miniature adults" so common in children's books.

It was also a wonderful vacation from the adult world. There was recently a mass shooting, leaving dozens dead. Does it matter which one? I decided to donate blood, and because I've got a relaxed schedule, the blood bank convinced me to donate platelets/aphaeresis, which takes a lot longer. I was able to read this entire little jewel in the two hours I was hooked up to that annoying machine.

This is definitely one of those instances in which you simply can't read Book Two in the series without having read Book One, sinceA very good sequel.

This is definitely one of those instances in which you simply can't read Book Two in the series without having read Book One, since the two form an integral story. It also helps if you've read the first fairly recently, since Lee doesn't put any effort into bringing the reader up to speed (or back up to speed) with world building.

Not spending prose on pedantic world building was something that I used to applaud greatly, because it was rare. Now, award-winning novels seem to be in a competition to see who can get away with the most complex and obtuse worlds without assisting the reader at all. It's an amusing challenge, but I suspect there are some readers out there who will be quite frustrated.

Almost any interesting review will contain spoilers, assuming the first book has been read. But this was a great entry in a very interesting year for Hugo nominations.­...more

For example, he strenuously defended the confirmation to SCOTUS of Neil Gorsuch along party lines by pointing out that he had been unanimously confirmed when named to the 10th Circuit, effectively asserting that the change in stance by the Democrats was an unconscionable partisan tactic. But when the partisan tactics with respect to Merrick Garland was noted by a listener, Flake denied the parallel. He blames Democrats for some things, such as wholesale denial of appointments, and changing Senate rules (e.g., the filibuster) to disempower the GOP when it was in the minority, apparently misremembering Newt Gingrich’s take-no-prisoners initiatives in the 1990s — or Nixon’s “southern strategy” decades earlier.

The New Republic says his book “rings hollow”, but I’m struggling to get outside of the liberal echo chamber, so I’m suspicious of their conclusions. I like the Economist’s review, which is more balanced in its criticisms.

Senator Flake has extraordinarily low approval ratings in his home state, at only 18%. If I was going to point to an ulterior motive for his writing this book, it would be to position himself as a principled and thoughtful person to kick off his post-electoral career, and, perhaps, to boost his chances at return if Trump’s tenure ends poorly for the nation and/or GOP. He seems somewhat reconciled to the prospect of losing his seat, repeating that “some things ‘are more important than a political career.’”...more

Becky Chambers’ book is a delightful oddity. It’s quite sweet, which isn’t very common in science fiction.

The plot is pretty hackneyed: a crew of misfBecky Chambers’ book is a delightful oddity. It’s quite sweet, which isn’t very common in science fiction.

The plot is pretty hackneyed: a crew of misfits take on challenges that force them to come together as a team, or even as a family.

Most stories put a lot more attention into the challenges, and less on the relationships, and that’s what makes this unusual. We get to know that family, to the point that [almost] all of them feel familiar, and several become intimate acquaintances.

That’s cool, but what makes the book special is that Chambers has great skill in depicting everyday situations and interactions deeply and realistically.

The flaw in this simple but excellent book is a major spoiler.(view spoiler)[

The most dramatic moments involve the two characters we know the least. They’re understandably difficult characters to build.

One is the Navigator, who isolates himself/themself on purpose. Since most of the character building is done via interactions (as opposed, for example, to internal monologues), we really don’t spend much time there.

The other is the ship’s computer, Lovey, whose death is the drama that finishes the book. Chambers works too hard to tell us that she’s a fully fleshed character, but doesn’t have a good way to show us. Her interactions with everyone but Jenks are friendly and warm, but distant. It’s too easy to envision her as programmed to be friendly, like a futuristic Siri. But apparently she and Jenks are in love… but why? Well, apparently they’ve had a lot of late night conversations. Not enough, for the purposes of this story.

Any author should write what they know, and what they know is probably what they find most interesting.

Ada Palmer is a professor of history, focusing on the pre-modern world, including understanding the “alien mindsets” of those that lived in such a different time and culture. These and more are evident in her writing.

There is a great emphasis here on the roles of those individuals with power. After all, if your focus is on how people think, then your subject will be the people doing the thinking, not the social forces that might be pushing and shoving entire populations. This is approximate the Great Man theory of history, since her cast of characters is wide and fairly diverse, but they all have something that makes them highly influential.

The psychology Palmer has created in her world is byzantine, even baroque. The nation-state has been replaced by “hives”, each of which governs itself according different rules, and what global governance there is obeys even fewer explicit rules. That creates a very intricate game for her characters to be playing, with a wide scope for confusion, misdirection, and manipulation.

That undoubtedly also reflects the Renaissance Europe she studies. That was a time well before the treaties which created the Peace of Westphalia essentially created modern international relations.

These are unusual skills to find in a science fiction author, and they’re done extraordinarily well here, despite this being Palmer’s debut series. In recent years, science fiction has moved further into “social science fiction”, with less emphasis on speculation about technological developments and the physical sciences, and a greater emphasis on social psychology. Most other authors (for example, Ann Leckie or N.K. Jemisin) haven’t switched so dramatically to the social world, but the tendency is quite noticeable.

In other examples, today’s science fiction is provoking thinking and discussions about topics that our civilization still needs to work out. Gender plays a big role here, as well as in quite a few other notable books. We’re starting to see a deeper study of how artificial intelligence will play out, which is implicitly about philosophy and psychology, not technology.

I also welcome this, although that response isn’t universal. Earlier generations of science fiction dealt poorly with social issues. Many earlier authors choose not to look at contemporary problems at all, and many of those that did were ham-fisted in their analysis. Only a handful of authors did it well.

But it is for those very reasons that I don’t really like Palmer’s “great man” presentation. For the sake of her story, she has to concentrate too much of the drama onto a small cast. (I found the social intricacies of her story fascinating, and they felt largely authentic.)

Is there an alternative? Sure — at the opposite extreme is to build the story around the experiences of one or more everyman.

My personal lodestar for this is the movie Blade Runner, with a protagonist who clearly is in over his head, is often clueless about what’s going on, and is largely incapable of solving the problem he is confronted with. Actually, Roy is the real protagonist here, which is the radical change from the novel the movie is based on. But he, too, is a pawn of greater forces. Showing how those “greater forces” can bully a character is, in my opinion, more powerful than showing those who are (presented as) creating the situation.

Which brings me to the last thing that I think Palmer did well, and contributed to her Hugo nomination. She employs a number of “big questions” which drive the story. Roy, in Blade Runner, was an antihero who ended up being surprisingly sympathetic because we recognized he was discriminated against as non-human, when he repeatedly showed every indication that he was as human as his tormentors. His dilemma was, effectively, the problem of what makes us human. That there is no easy answer to this question creates the overarching drama of the story.

Palmer harnesses a number of “big questions”. The one that really caught my attention is a minor spoiler: (view spoiler)[Would you destroy one world to save another? Would you even destroy a better world to save the one you happen to live in? (hide spoiler)] One reason this was notable is that it also arises in Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky — another of 2017’s Hugo nominations. Is that a coincidence? I think not: I believe it is an increasingly pressing question in our own world, although in most circles, it is a question that will feel like science fiction.­...more

I’d strongly recommend this for anyone curious about meditation, specifically the Buddhist Vipassanā “mindfulness” meditation that everyone and theirI’d strongly recommend this for anyone curious about meditation, specifically the Buddhist Vipassanā “mindfulness” meditation that everyone and their dog is doing, attempting, or at least talking about.

What Robert Wright provides is the very welcome examination of the scientific basis of the claims and practice. Wright is a journalist so deeply embedded in cognitive science that he has taught in the philosophy department at Princeton and the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s written several books on related topics, and taught a six-week Coursera online course on “Buddhism and Modern Psychology”, which was part of his preparation for writing this. Wright has also been meditating seriously for many years.

So you could think of this as a mostly unbiased, non-spiritual defense of Buddhism. Unlike every other book on the topic out there, he doesn’t assert the Buddha was the enlightened one and genuflect; in fact, the concept of enlightenment comes in for some rough treatment before Wright concludes that the goal isn’t as important as the attempt to progress towards that somewhat amorphous objective.

The early chapters provide the scientific basis; the later ones are about Wright’s philosophical examination of meditation — and frankly, those latter chapters got kind of repetitive and boring.

But meditation connected in multiple ways to current cognitive science.

■ The attempt of the meditator to take control of their own thought process is related to the gradual recognition of the default mode network, which is that part of your brain that is active when you’re daydreaming, or when distracting ideas come unbidden when you’re trying to focus, or even trying to sleep. When you’re really focused on something, this network is usually quiet, but it gets in the way a lot. Meditation is an attempt to tame that.

■ The connection between thoughts and emotions is examined. There’s a strong case here that no thought can exist without being tied somehow to an emotion, which is why your subconscious “cares enough” about it to present the thought to your conscious self. This is consistent with recent work in identity-protective cognition, which tells us that we didn’t evolve the ability to think in order to be logical and rational, but to aggressively defend those emotionally-connected thoughts. Wright mentions tribal cognition several times, which is the social version of those identity-protective mental heuristics. I agree with Wright that tribalism is highly caustic in modern society, and he believes that meditation is the best chance at saving the world. I’m doubtful, primarily because of free riders and the coordination problem, but he’s point is a good one otherwise.

■ And, as I noted, mindfulness meditation is now everywhere. In the August 29, 2017 episode of the excellent science podcast STEM-Talk, the hosts interview David Spiegel, a psychologist who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on hypnosis. I listen to that podcast because it dives deep into the science, but I really wasn’t surprised when the connection between hypnosis and meditation came up early on, and Dr. Spiegel noted that they work in related ways, and that people who are good at meditation tend to be good good subjects of hypnosis.

If you’re interested in mindfulness meditation but need convincing that it isn’t just a bunch of mystical nonsense — or you’re just curious — then this is the only book out there.­...more

Staveley does a great job in some parts of this book, and somewhat poorly in others.

Let’s look at his strengths.

First: action. When his characters areStaveley does a great job in some parts of this book, and somewhat poorly in others.

Let’s look at his strengths.

First: action. When his characters are in peril and fighting for survival, the story is riveting.

Second: clever complications — mostly. He definitely stretches farther here than many authors, although not everything hangs together quite yet. Part of that might be how he is structuring the trilogy, since he may be setting things up in the first book that appear nonsensical until later. But that’s a known problem in fiction. Other storytellers bury the apparent contradictions or irrelevancies a little deeper, or provide more camouflage.

Third, somewhat of a strength: adolescent protagonists. These kids are in their late teens. They’re often stupid, and even more often impetuous. They take stupid risks. Well, duh: integration of “higher” cognitive functions doesn’t finish until the late twenties — assuming they’re neurotypical humans. It would have been good if some of the adults in their life had indirectly reminded us of how young they are, which is why this is only “somewhat”. There probably should have been more deaths in the military thread, since you’ve given a bunch of high school students live weapons and little direct supervision.

Weaknesses? Yeah, quite a few.

One very big frustration is the male-centric story. Of the fifty chapters, the emperor’s daughter (and eldest child, still in the capital, for goodness’ sake) is featured in only five of them. In most of those, she is thoughtless and emotional, reacting impotently to events without any sign of cleverness that her training should have engendered. She has no apparent friends or allies — or life, really. Another character compliments her as clear-seeing, which is laughable based on what we’ve seen.

There are other females, some of which play very important secondary roles. I didn’t track every conversation, but I’m pretty sure the book dismally fails the Bechdel test: these women aren’t just portrayed as secondary in the narrative, but also aren’t treated as primary within their own lives. There are some good points: the women in the military story arc are seen as strong and very competent and highly varied in personality, and there’s a tiny nod to non-heterosexual acceptability. However… well, I’ll mention another difficulty in a spoiler, below.

The focus on physical appearance is always troubling, but the problem is that the narrative voice is almost always from a heterosexual male, so the targets of sexualized commentary are women. So while the body of almost every woman is leered at from a protagonist’s perspective, men are merely described by the authorial voice. And in those few chapters involving the princess, we don’t get a highly sexualized perspective, even though she’s also an adolescent and could very well have spent substantial time ogling the beefcake soldiers she’s surrounded by. It also is grating that she is the only sibling that both allows lust to critically cloud her judgement and uses her sexuality as a weapon. (The monk brother had little opportunity along these lines until the final chapters, but then passes that test with flying colors.)

A larger problem is that the story isn’t structured as well as it could be. I like that all of the chapters are fairly short, and some are very short. That made it easier to switch between the story arcs gracefully… but there are lengthy portions through the book where tension and intrigue is building in one brother’s thread, however we sporadically interrupt to jump to the other brother’s less interesting life. The attempt to maintain some sort of simultaneity is understandable, since their stories will eventually converge. But the forced parity means the story loses energy, and some readers lose interest.

How might that have been fixed? Well, drop simultaneity. Create a story element that allows the reader mentally resynchronize those threads. For example, I read this just after the big eclipse in August of 2017. Hey! How about an eclipse? The monks will be talking about it, as will the soldiers, so we can use that as a story calendar. What else? An unseasonably bad winter, slowly passing and discussed? Either of those could also be tied to superstitions regarding regime change. Or a peripheral war, generating news and maybe refugees, peripheral to both threads (but perhaps also tied in later).

I get the sense that this chaos is more likely to be a problem with stream-of-consciousness authors, who write the story without substantial outlining beforehand. (The opposite problem would probably be a lack of passion, as the narrative is later constructed to fit into the story arcs, as opposed to arising organically.)

A good editor could have helped with that, as well as with some other problems. For example, the monks live high in the mountains, surrounded by raw granite. But they generate income with pottery. Wait… clay is mined from river beds, far far far downstream. Mountain streams won’t even tend to have gravel, much less sand — and clay is a geological absurdity. Even a meadow will tend to be rock and decomposed granite. Also: where do they get the wood for cookfires, much less the kilns?

Similarly, when you ponder how much food those giant birds must eat — where are the vast ranches? What do you do with the guano of a bird capable of carrying a squad of soldiers?

Finally, the nature of evil. Anyone who has read enough of my reviews knows this is a bugaboo I find especially irksome. In this story, Bad People are bad, and Good People are good. Sometimes the Good People are confused, and don’t have good enough information to trust other Good People, but their motivations are still clear.

We know early on that Bad People have killed the emperor, and maybe more Bad People are still trying to do Bad Things to his children. But there are other Bad People, too — just because they’re bad. Oh, maybe they’re also on the bigger team of Bad People, or maybe not.

The “merchants” who come to the monastery are a little more nuanced… NOT! Even though we are prompted to initially see them as suspicious, they turn out to be Good People. One does kill the fat kid, but that’s hard-nosed, gimlet-gaze triage. Moreover, even the possibility of treachery is removed by portraying them as honest agents of a religion that frees them from worldly ambition. They might not be specifically on Team Good here, but they are undisputedly Good People.

All of the villains are nefarious, which falls into the trap of ultimate evil. That’s an absurdly common pitfall in genre fiction, of course, but that doesn’t make it any better.

In this story, we learn that the emperor is a benevolent despot, but necessary as the Keeper of the Gates — but most people think the Csestriim as long gone, if not merely mythical, right? So why can’t the “bad guys” simply want a more republican form of government? Why do they have to be evil, when they could merely be misguided, and perhaps manipulated?

At the lower level of character portrayals, everyone is pretty much on Team Good or Team Evil. The people that must be killed by our heroes are sadistic and cruel, and like hanging out with others that are sadistic and cruel. How convenient!

It is also notable that none of the villains are women. (Some of the women are sadistic and cruel, but that just nominally puts them on Team Evil; they don’t get to be real characters.) One might hope that the author merely sees women as too good and pure and honest and ethical, but unfortunately it is more likely that the author doesn’t (yet?) see women as autonomous agents in his story building. Hopefully that will change in later works — this is a debut effort — but given how much media attention there’s been to this issue in recent years, this is a bad start.

Oh, and a minor point, which that missing editor should have caught: The doomed fat kid element was unnecessarily clumsy, too.

First, and most critically: fat doesn’t mean weak. If this monk had been doing anything like the tasks our hero had, he might well have stayed fat, but would have had plenty of muscle to keep up. Don’t believe me? Look at some of those NFL offensive tackles.

Even if he had been strong as an ox, it was somewhat implausible that of all the monks, the huge one somehow made it out of the camp. Just because he’s going to make more noise and be harder to see.

It was also unnecessary. There are other ways to create a need for such situational ethics, some of which could have been much more dramatic. For example, we don’t know if the monastery’s abbot, Nin, needs to survive for the sequels, but assuming he doesn’t, he could have been brought along but have been seriously injured. Killing him would have made just as much sense, but would have created deeper tensions and a more complex story. If he’s needed later in the series, then that poor doomed Pater kid could have been saved to die one chapter later.[End of spoiler!(hide spoiler)]...more

De Tocqueville is famous, at least in the United States, for his work Democracy in America. But he also wrote about his home county, and France was aDe Tocqueville is famous, at least in the United States, for his work Democracy in America. But he also wrote about his home county, and France was a pretty crazy place through the nineteenth century. He was of the nobility, but (partially due to his time in the U.S.) was more attuned to the flaws and troubles of the democratic and republican forms of government than many of his contemporaries. He wrote this book, Recollections on the French Revolution, as a memoir without planning on publication, so it is frank to a sometimes brutal extent regarding the other leading figures in revolutionary France. De Tocqueville’s Recollections weren't written contemporaneously with events, but fairly soon, and with no expectation of publication.

It is unfortunate that a private diary can be subpoenaed in the United States. The law isn’t perfectly clear on that, but it seems likely that most highly-placed government officials will be too wary of that problem to write as candidly as de Tocqueville did. (He actually wrote after the events at hand, but still within just a few years.) Such a memoir of a highly positioned person provides a glimpse of inner workings which would often seem too quotidian to remember at the end of a long career, but would provide the historian, the psychologist, and even the lay reader with a clearer view of that world....more

This science-fiction-fantasy novel, set in the middling-nearish future, starts off awkwardly, but eventually gains its footing and goes on to rock theThis science-fiction-fantasy novel, set in the middling-nearish future, starts off awkwardly, but eventually gains its footing and goes on to rock the zeitgeist. Well, the geek zeitgeist here in San Francisco, that is. It doesn’t even pretend to touch on the political and cultural problems the United States and the world are facing in 2017. So it counts as escapist, definitely.

The author is a co-founding editor to the geek site io9, and has a substantial presence in the SF Bay Area scene. But her imagination and writing is why you’ll want to read this.

Quite a few folks seem to abandon this book less than halfway through: I sympathize. The tween angst was over the top, really. Every kid (well, almost?) feels persecuted by every human being in the world at some point, and Anders’ two protagonists push that stereotype to the edge and beyond.

But roughly halfway through the book, when the kids get to San Francisco (♥︎), it gets better. A lot better. What happens on the tech side of the story is LOL crazy, but that’s a fitting counterbalance to what is happening on the magic side of the story. Since the world is falling apart faster than the foam on a cheap latte, both sides are racing to preserve what they value — which means they’re on a high speed collision course. Can our heroes get over themselves and rescue the world?

A lagniappe: this story includes a playful and very, very optimistic vision of how the Singularity might turn out!

Postscript: So, the author got a lot of flack over how the story arc of Patricia’s cat just kind of terminates in mid arc, so she wrote a short story to wrap up that loose end, here: Clover.­...more

My four-star rating is probably undeservedly high. I believe the reason I got so much out of this book is because my professor taught in a way that coMy four-star rating is probably undeservedly high. I believe the reason I got so much out of this book is because my professor taught in a way that complimented it so well. This was the text, of course, for the required class in Second Language Development; the same professor had taught the Classroom Management class I'd take the prior semester, and she did a great job with our text there, too.

Ironically, one of the ways I think this will be most helpful to me isn't with Second Language Learners, but with English-language students who are weak in academic language (or discourse/praxis, or discourse/Discourse, as I got from my class in "Literacy Across Content Areas"). The skills involved in differentiating lessons for language learners is largely applicable to the latter as well....more

It took me forever to realize that, while I really enjoy theory, I’m not very good at learning theory in the absence of practical examples. My “aha!”It took me forever to realize that, while I really enjoy theory, I’m not very good at learning theory in the absence of practical examples. My “aha!” moments tend to come grudgingly when I have to put the jigsaw together without the picture on the front of the fox, as it were. Sorry, weak analogy.

This is, I think, why I burned out on mathematics back in my school years. Math up through trigonometry was sufficiently intuitively practical that I just loved it (it is even telling that I seem to have slept through what was taught on hyperbolic functions), but my calculus teacher, as brilliant as she was, taught the subject with a spiritual orientation. I distinctly remember her encouraging us to close our eyes and imagine the loneliness of zero during the lesson on limits. She had her eyes closed, blissful and enraptured, while all her students looked at each other in wide-eyed bewilderment. I tried again as a senior, but tragically my second calculus instructor decided over Christmas that he had to go help his relatives in Argentina protest the coup, and never returned.

I compounded the mistake by trying to be a math major at university, but it just kept getting more abstract and boring. I probably would have failed my final quarter of differential equations if my roommate hadn’t been in the same class, and warned me when tests were coming. Switching to computer science was a life-saver.

Oh, anyway — this book. Designing a lesson plan is a lot less abstract than university-level math, but I still struggled with seeing how to apply the theory to the actual classroom.

This book is, frankly, brilliant at the fairly small thing it sets out to do: design lessons in such a way as to encourage students to participate in their own learning, and that of their peers. It combines the step-by-step theory with walk-throughs of examples using that framework.

The key is to, during lesson planning, anticipate where students will stumble, make mistakes, and otherwise show signs of struggle, and design the lessons to use what might otherwise be problems as a scaffold. Anticipating is only the first of the titular Five Practices, but it is the critical lead-in.

Any author should write what they know, and what they know is probably what they find most interesting.

Ada Palmer is a professor of history, focusing on the pre-modern world, including understanding the “alien mindsets” of those that lived in such a different time and culture. These and more are evident in her writing.

There is a great emphasis here on the roles of those individuals with power. After all, if your focus is on how people think, then your subject will be the people doing the thinking, not the social forces that might be pushing and shoving entire populations. This is approximate the Great Man theory of history, since her cast of characters is wide and fairly diverse, but they all have something that makes them highly influential.

The psychology Palmer has created in her world is byzantine, even baroque. The nation-state has been replaced by “hives”, each of which governs itself according different rules, and what global governance there is obeys even fewer explicit rules. That creates a very intricate game for her characters to be playing, with a wide scope for confusion, misdirection, and manipulation.

That undoubtedly also reflects the Renaissance Europe she studies. That was a time well before the treaties which created the Peace of Westphalia essentially created modern international relations.

These are unusual skills to find in a science fiction author, and they’re done extraordinarily well here, despite this being Palmer’s debut series. In recent years, science fiction has moved further into “social science fiction”, with less emphasis on speculation about technological developments and the physical sciences, and a greater emphasis on social psychology. Most other authors (for example, Ann Leckie or N.K. Jemisin) haven’t switched so dramatically to the social world, but the tendency is quite noticeable.

In other examples, today’s science fiction is provoking thinking and discussions about topics that our civilization still needs to work out. Gender plays a big role here, as well as in quite a few other notable books. We’re starting to see a deeper study of how artificial intelligence will play out, which is implicitly about philosophy and psychology, not technology.

I also welcome this, although that response isn’t universal. Earlier generations of science fiction dealt poorly with social issues. Many earlier authors choose not to look at contemporary problems at all, and many of those that did were ham-fisted in their analysis. Only a handful of authors did it well.

But it is for those very reasons that I don’t really like Palmer’s “great man” presentation. For the sake of her story, she has to concentrate too much of the drama onto a small cast. (I found the social intricacies of her story fascinating, and they felt largely authentic.)

Is there an alternative? Sure — at the opposite extreme is to build the story around the experiences of one or more everyman.

My personal lodestar for this is the movie Blade Runner, with a protagonist who clearly is in over his head, is often clueless about what’s going on, and is largely incapable of solving the problem he is confronted with. Actually, Roy is the real protagonist here, which is the radical change from the novel the movie is based on. But he, too, is a pawn of greater forces. Showing how those “greater forces” can bully a character is, in my opinion, more powerful than showing those who are (presented as) creating the situation.

Which brings me to the last thing that I think Palmer did well, and contributed to her Hugo nomination. She employs a number of “big questions” which drive the story. Roy, in Blade Runner, was an antihero who ended up being surprisingly sympathetic because we recognized he was discriminated against as non-human, when he repeatedly showed every indication that he was as human as his tormentors. His dilemma was, effectively, the problem of what makes us human. That there is no easy answer to this question creates the overarching drama of the story.

Palmer harnesses a number of “big questions”. The one that really caught my attention is a minor spoiler: (view spoiler)[Would you destroy one world to save another? Would you even destroy a better world to save the one you happen to live in? (hide spoiler)] One reason this was notable is that it also arises in Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky — another of 2017’s Hugo nominations. Is that a coincidence? I think not: I believe it is an increasingly pressing question in our own world, although in most circles, it is a question that will feel like science fiction.

Here’s a handy bullet-point list of a few of the book’s features.• Countries are obsolete, and remain nothing but nostalgic identity groups.• Hypervelocity transit around the world is one explanation for the above. (Money still exists, although the cost to use these flying cars is too trivial to mention, at least for the central characters in the book.)• “Hives” (read: globe-spanning tribes and identity affiliations) have replaced those countries — sort of.• Families are obsolete, replaced by affirmatively-chosen groups of associates — communes, although not named as such.• Religions are outlawed, kind of. More specifically, unsupervised discussions about religion among three or more people are outlawed, although everyone is assigned a “sensayer” guide for their own personal reflection on these issues.• Gender is … confusing. At times, it seems suppressed, at other times (especially in the narrative) it is highlighted, but very few of the characters are depicted consistently. Oh, for the prudish or apprehensive: there’s definitely some sexual kinkiness in here, along with some second-hand descriptions of horrific violence.• God walks among us — there is a fantasy element within what otherwise would be a Hard Futurist Social Sci-Fi book. Part of that is revealed within the first pages, but it gets complicated later on.

I’m sure I’m missing other big issues. There are two big flaws here: first, the thing is just too damn complicated. It really needs an annotated index. But part of what makes it complicated is also what makes it wondrous, at least to those of us who like our science fiction complicated: the author doesn’t spend any time in explaining the world she has created. Most newb authors make the mistake of boring the reader with elaborate descriptions of their imagined world; Palmer just drops us into the deep end and forces us to swim or sink. This ultimately leads to the other flaw, though. Not enough happens. Reading Too Like the Lightning is akin to walking into a movie theater expecting to see a high-tech thriller and discovering oneself in a fascinating museum, instead. Engrossing, but you’re going to have to do a lot more work to remain entertained.

Still, as Cory Doctorow said when the book was first published: “If you read a debut novel this year, make it Too Like the Lightning.”

Postscript:I stumbled on this novel indirectly. Ada Palmer was interviewed at the You Are Not So Smart podcast, in the episode Is progress inevitable? She’s definitely a complex character, herself. Listen to the podcast just to hear about her academic hobby of re-running the events around the Papal election of 1490. Or, less interestingly, read about it here....more

Sabatini’s Scaramouche is an engaging and entertaining book, but with far, far too many serious flaws to be considered great literature — or anythingSabatini’s Scaramouche is an engaging and entertaining book, but with far, far too many serious flaws to be considered great literature — or anything close to it.

Read and enjoy if you want, but if you never get around to it, don’t worry. No great loss.